Remember the old age saying, “don’t play with your food”? Well here I am encouraging you to get messy with your kids. It is the most fabulous base for a number of activities, but we have picked our top 5.
Lets start with making your own coloured salt/”sand”, it couldn’t be easier. In fact, you could even make that an activity in itself!
How to make coloured sand
There are two ways – the first takes a little longer but is really fun to get the kids involved. That’s using chalk. Take a sheet of card and place it on a baking tray. Pour some fine salt over the card, and rub the chalk through the salt, grinding it up. As it mixes with the salts the colour will transfer, and you will end up making a pretty picture on the sheet of card as well.
The other way takes about 5 minutes of prep time. Pour salt into some glad seal bags . Pour some food colouring or paint into the bags and mix, mix, mix. Pour the coloured salt onto a tray to dry.
Sensory Play with Salt
The options are truly endless here, and we have only just started exploring ways to play with salt. It makes the most incredible base for sensory play and we have used it often in our mini world play.
Watercolour raised salt painting.
This is a great Science based activity for kinds, allowing them to see how colour spreads through the salt. Do it with plain uncoloured salt for maximum effect. You can do this with salt rocks/sea salt as well as fine iodized salt. Draw a pattern with glue onto some card and pour the salt onto the glue and let it dry. Taking some watercolours, or a dropper/pipette and dab it onto the dried crystals. Watch as the colour spreads!
Salt Tray Writing
This is a great activity for older kids to practise their writing skills, and younger kids to learn cause and effect. Its literally like “writing in the sand”. It’s great for encouraging creativity and is actually a proven “calm down” method. Who doesn’t love a “zen garden”? Use a paint brush to practise pincer grip or simply let the kids use their fingers to trace in the sand.
Coloured Salt Jars
This is a fabulous activity for concentration and these little jars make perfect DIY gifts. Simply fill any small clear jar with different coloured sand. I love the contrast of using plain white between. It gets the kids scooping, funnelling and they will be amazed by the different layers once its complete. You can also turn these into the most incredible candles, but that’s a different blog post all together.
Coloured Salt Painting.
Similar to raised salt painting, but using coloured salt from the beginning. You can create the most glorious art pictures. We tried to do some Rangoli art (not very successfully), but I used it as a lesson to teach the kids about the Diwali festival. I’m definitely going to use this in our Ramadan art this year.
Create your own bath salts.
We have been making our own bath salts for a while and recently I’ve been experimenting more with adding essential oils into them. An easy recipe is as follows, you can choose to add in an essential oils if you wish:
- 1 1/2 cup of Epsom Salts
- 1/2 cup of Sea Salt
- 1/3 cup baking soda
So there you have it! 5 ways to “play” with your salt ! Have you tried any other ways to incorporate salt into your sensory play or art? I’d love to see your works of art, if you are on Instagram, please tag me at @inthesestilettos !